SBF, NSC at loggerheads |23 March 2018

The Seychelles Basketball Federation has expressed its disappointment at what it has termed as “interference by the National Sports Council in its operation” but the local sports body has said it is just taking the initiative to save the sport.

Seychelles Basketball Federation (SBF) chairman Terry Celeste voiced out his concern during a press conference on Wednesday afternoon at the Exiles Club.

The bone of contention is the taking over of the federations’ youth development programme by the National Sports Council (NSC) and the involvement of the under-18 boys’ national basketball team in a competition in Qatar without the knowledge of the federation.  

The team are under the guidance of Serbian Andrija Golubovic, a basketball coach employed by the NSC.

In the presence of SBF secretary general Adrian Pillay, chairman Celeste said: “NSC just took the team without contacting the federation and the team left, where to, we don’t know. On what purpose we don’t know and this puts our federation at risk of getting into trouble with the Fédération Internationale de Basket-ball (Fiba) as it is the federation which is supposed to send teams to international competitions not the NSC.”

Chairman Celeste added that the two international Serbian coaches, Andrija Golubovic and his brother Filip Golubovic, who are both employed by the NSC, are supposed to be working with the federation but this is not the case.

“The NSC has made all certified Seychellois coaches working with youth development, around 10 of them, redundant just to create the posts for the two foreigners. We have Seychellois coaches who can do the job,” exclaimed chairman Celeste.

He added that there is no signed document, to his knowledge, stating that the Serbians are supposed to take over the youth development with the federation.

“The NSC is there to facilitate, assist, advise, but not to take away programmes from the federation and implement those itself. We are the ones to do it. It’s a very disappointing situation,” continued chairman Celeste. 

Contacted by Sports NATION yesterday, NSC’s director for sports management and development, Terrence Barbé, said the SBF failed to take responsibility of the youth basketball development programme and for the sake of game, something had to be done.

He explained that the SBF knew about the competition as he personally sent a letter to the basketball federation a month ago to inform it that the NSC anticipates to send the under-18 boys’ team to the competition at the invitation of the Qatar Basketball Federation through contacts made by the two Serbians and would like their input, and they responded but later showed no interest.

“We also invited the federation to discuss the youth development programme which they did and it was agreed that in a week’s time, they would draft a development plan. We did ours and took the best elements out of these plans for the under-12 and under-14 years development programme. They never did theirs and it’s been three months now,” said Mr Barbé.

As for the under-18 years boys’ and girls’ teams they have been training for the last five months and the coaches have also put together the under-14 years team, said Mr Barbé, adding that the federation was approached on three occasions to have their youth development coaches join the programme but nothing happened.

“This is why the NSC had to do something for the sake of basketball as it shows that the federation doesn’t have a plan for youth development,” said Mr Barbé, who added that NSC closed down the SBF youth development programme to take care of it because it was not working as players and coaches were not turning up for training and the federation did not attend to it.

He noted that the Serbian basketball experts have nothing to do with the training of the senior national teams.

The members of the Seychelles under-18 boys’ national team who are in Qatar are Nicolas Laporte, Alexandro Sirame, Anil Charlette, Nicolas Fostel, Perry Pointe, Sebastian Thomas, Luciano Roseline, Khris Bouchereau, Harry Adelaide, Tainio Ah-Kong and Steven Hoareau.

The players are being accompanied by coach Andrija Golubovic and Jennifer Bonne as team manager. The delegation is expected back on March 30.

P. J.